Simultaneously with Lenny, I decided to try my hand at making a homemade version of the Stormcast Eternals endless spell the Everblaze Comet. Going in I was only really trying to make a decent enough version to try it out a bit and have a bit of an experiment with terrain-adjacent skills.
The concept was very straightforward, I wanted to make a crater with a flaming meteor in it.
I started out by moulding the crater shape. The base size for this model is a 65mm circle, so I 3D printed a suitable circle. It's unfortunately a bit small for a nice big crater with lots of detail, so I kept it simple. The guide I followed to make the crater was from Wargames Illustrated. Essentially, you make a ring of card, stick it in place and then build the edges of the crater up with air drying clay. I think I might have made it just a little bit too deep here, but you live and learn.
While that dried, I also prepared the comet itself. This was also 3d printed, from a file I found on
Thingiverse. I enlarged it a bit so it'd fit and be a nice presence on the base. I couldn't get it to print in one piece without lots of supports, so I figured I'd just cut it so I had two flat surfaces to place on the bed. It worked, but I often have warping issues with my printer because it doesn't have a heated bed (note: if you want an FDM printer, get one with a heated bed, don't make the same mistake I did). What this meant is the two halves didn't line up too well and there was quite a gap between them. I did my best to fill it with some green stuff but I find green stuff super difficult to work with, I'm sure I'm doing something wrong. You can probably see where the gap was in the above photo. I figured that it's already not the highest quality print, so I'll run with it. I sprayed the whole thing with grey primer, probably a bit more than I would normally for a model because part of the point was to reduce the appearance of the individual layers of the print.
I went for a super simple colour scheme for the comet, starting with an electric blue and building up with drybrushes of darker blues and ending with a dark purple colour.
It's a pretty messy job for sure, but it looks alright from tabletop distance, and that's what matters. It's essentially the same method as painting fire, but with blues. If I were to repaint this though, I'd choose a slightly different palette. I sort of mostly just went darker, but I think the thing that makes fire work really well with this method is moving from yellow to orange to red, so if I were to try again I would try to start with perhaps a paler more of a sky blue, go to a really vibrant deep blue, and then work up to more of a true purple. Still, it's not bad.
To finish, I had to decorate the crater. I also went for a simple process here. I covered it in PVA and some basing material. I'm not sure exactly what it is or what it's supposed to be used for, but it was a sort of coarse material. Then I covered the whole thing with black, and drybrushed with a couple of successively lighter layers of brown before gluing some tufts and rocks on kind of at random because I thought it needed a bit more visual interest.
The idea was to do a quick job that was passable and I think I succeeded. I learnt a lot, and I had quite a bit of fun playing with the clay. I have nearly a whole pack of that stuff left, perhaps I'll do some traditional sculpting, perhaps I'll make some more terrain. I don't think anyone would mistake my Everblaze Comet for the official model, but it's recognisable and it looks alright from a tabletop distance. It's a learning process.
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